Fanatic Live

I(TheSteve) have released a program which skins MSN Messenger by modifying its resources within memory - instead of patching the executable, allowing much easier installation and management of skins, especially if you want to be able to have more than one skin.

As I posted on the forum:

Up until now, skinning of MSN Messenger has been done by directly modifying the Messenger files. While this method works, I don’t believe this is the best way to do it for a number of reasons.

• It is cumbersome for the user to manage the skins.
• It is difficult to create an delivery method for installing the patch.
• You cannot have more than 1 skin at a time.
• Switch between skins means swaping files around which means more space use on the hard disk.
• Future versions of Messenger (WLM) have digital signatures which prevent tampering with the actual files.

So I suggest we use a different method of skinning. Instead of modifing Messenger’s files, we can create a loadable patch with only the changed information. If you take this patch, we can load the patch in to memory and make Messenger use our information only when we need it replaced.

Based on this idea, I have created a patch loader which will do that. Currently this is just at the beginning of it’s life (not perfect yet). I have attached a stable (or so I think) build. This build contains 2 sample patches. They are located in the Skins folder of the installation folder (C:\Program Files\MSN Skinner\Skins). One designed for MSN Messenger 7 and one designed for Windows Live Messenger Beta (default patch). So if you not using Live Messenger, you’ll need to change the patch before starting messenger.

More info at the forum topic.